Public Speaking

Fran Lebowitz is one of the great wits and most astute, acerbic observers of culture to ever walk the streets of Manhattan. That’s a bold statement, especially considering the fact that she has suffered perhaps the longest case of writer’s block in the history of professional writing. It’s more of a “writer’s blockade” Lebowitz quips, about the fact that she’s only published three books in her life—two collections of comic-essays, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), and one children’s book, Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas (1994). Yet when we experience Lebowitz’s mental acuity and provocative insights by simply listening to her speak, we come to understand why so many have compared her to the legendary New York writer, critic, satirist, and fixture of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker.

Martin Scorsese’s Public Speaking is not a biographical movie about Lebowitz. It is a distillation of what makes her so incredibly unique, and a meditation on the accuracy of her observations. It is the best kind of personal documentary—one where the subject is alive, vibrant, and able to speak for themselves, and the filmmaker is simply there to capture and shape the material. This tiny HBO film, made in conjunction with an American Express campaign profiling great individuals, is easily one of the best Scorsese documentaries of his long career, in which he’s quietly directed as many non-fiction pictures as narrative features.

The movie is essentially Scorsese and an unnamed interviewer sitting with Lebowitz, in her favorite booth at New York’s Waverly Inn, with cinematographer Ellen Kuras turning on a camera and the filmmakers just letting the iconoclastic public speaker hold forth. This footage is cleverly intercut with a live interview Toni Morison conducted with Lebowitz, and footage from a typical lecture Lebowitz gives to college students (public speaking on the college circuit is largely how the author has made her living since she’s not published many books). 

The intercutting demonstrates how polished Lebowitz’s rants and pithy observations are. Despite her frequent use of “you know?” and “OK?”, this is not someone who only talks off the cuff. Lebowitz’s verbal musings are every bit as honed and practiced as those of a stand-up comic. Indeed, she comes off far like more of a great stand-up of the pre-politically-correct era than an essayist like her slightly older contemporary Norah Ephron. But, like a great stand-up, she’s also adept at speaking extemporaneously on the rare occasions when she’s questioned about something she’s never considered before or must respond to a heckler. Her storied comebacks to audience members who’ve tried to make disparaging or upstaging comments at her lectures are priceless and say as much about the contemporary American zeitgeist as her broader observations.

But what Fran Lebowitz really embodies is the long-forgotten fixture of the American culture that created her: the public intellectual. Here again, Scorsese and his editors intercut their footage of Lebowitz holding court with archive footage of the brilliant cultural commentators who influenced her—specifically James Baldwin, but also Trumann Capote, Gore Vidal, and William F. Buckley. We also get little glimpses of how she has utilized all that remains of the bountiful television airtime that was once devoted to those great thinkers—clips of her squeezed into the final minutes of Late Night with Conan O’Brian, a scene from her guest stint playing a judge on Law and Order, and an episode of the game show Jeopardy in which her quotes were used as a category.

Much of what this brilliant gay feminist icon has to say will ruffle some sensitive liberal feathers, especially her sharp pronouncements about gender, racism, sexism, gay rights, religion, gentrification, celebrity, and elitism. Perhaps the most profound and all-encompassing thing she points out is how the AIDS epidemic not only robbed the World (America specifically and New York even more specifically) of so many of its greatest artists but also, and more importantly, its greatest audience members—those whose rigorous standards drove the most vital artists and shaped the culture. Lebowitz unabashedly makes the case that without the demand for excellence that came from predominantly gay New York intellectuals and connoisseurs, mediocrity in both popular and “highbrow” culture has taken over to the point where it is rewarded and even lionized.

While her observations encompass all of America, everything in her worldview springs from New York City, which she no longer sees as a cultural Mecca, but is still as foundational to her perspective as anything in her childhood. We briefly learn that she was born in 1950, grew up in New Jersey, and escaped to the Big Apple in 1969, where she soon fell in with Andy Warhol and other gay, male, writers, artists, and tastemakers. Lebowitz romanticizes that epoch but also points out that everyone looks back at the era in which they were in their twenties as “the best of times.” She is as averse to romanticizing the past as she is to embracing technology.

All her discussion about Manhattan in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, combined with the involvement of Scorsese behind the camera, make this as much a film about New York as it is about popular culture or, for that matter, about Fran Lebowitz. Scorsese’s pleasure at sitting and talking with the quick-witted malcontent can’t be missed, as we hear him chuckling at much of what she says. But we can also draw parallels between her distinctly ‘70s era New York point of view and that of the director’s. Lebowitz briefly worked as a cab driver when she first got to the city and Scorsese goes out of his way to film her driving the white 1979 Checker cab she bought at an auction long ago and still keeps in Manhattan. He also includes footage and music from his own iconic film set in 1970s New York, Taxi Driver. 

By including this footage, is the director implying similarities between his fictional anti-hero Travis Bickle and Lebowitz? If so, what factors made Bickle into a violent, racist, isolated vigilante and Lebowitz into a celebrated wit? Is it that she’s a woman? That she’s gay? Jewish? An intellectual? All of the above? At the beginning of Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle muses, “someday a real rain is gonna come and wash all the scum off the streets.” Is it ironic, or cosmically fitting, that Manhattan is now largely a clean, safe, boring space for dimwitted tourists and the ultra-wealthy and that Lebowitz is still there to point out what a tremendous loss that is?